The Blacklist recap: Season 4, Episode 3

The Blacklist

“You believe your family is in danger because of who I am. But what you don’t seem to grasp is you’re also in danger because of who you are.”

That’s what Red tells Liz while standing beside the gravestone of one Elizabeth Keen — his reunion point of choice for the first in-person conversation between himself and Elizabeth since she faked her own death to get away from him. Oh yeah… he’s salty, alright.

But he’s also correct. The quote above seems to be the thesis statement for season 4 of The Blacklist: Yes, Liz’s life has been nothing but hell, bold haircuts, and unplanned pregnancies since Raymond Reddington fedora’d his way into it, but as with so many relationships, that has turned out to be less about the person and more about the timing. Red’s presence in Lizzie’s life might run parallel with the uptick in people trying to kidnap her all the time, but he’s not the reason; Liz’s mysterious past was always coming for her, Red is merely part of it. Lizzie… you just straight up in danger, girl.

And Red, the mere harbinger of that danger as he would claim, seems to have finally reached his limit on treating Liz with the kid gloves. In Thursday’s episode, Red might understand why Liz ran, but he’s not just going to lie down and accept her inability to grasp the inescapable nature of her past. You know what I don’t understand though…

WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH MR. KAPLAN AND COULD SOMEONE PLEASE GET HER A NICE WARM CUP OF TEA OR SOMETHING?! That’s right, Mr. Kaplan might be dying but she Ain’t. Dead. Yet. But before we can get to her, Thursday’s episode opens on a Blacklister we can finally sink our teeth into… one with a with a sociopathic-Zuckerberg vibe.

MILES MCGRATH, NO. 65

To the tune of !!!’s “Yadnus,” men in full battle gear rise out of a body of water and storm a power plant as a mystery man watches on his monitors slurping an energy drink. “In the beginning there was light. Then I said, ‘Let there be darkness,'” he says, knocking out the power to an entire city. But it turns out the man isn’t such a mystery after all… he’s Miles McGrath, the key to finding Alexander Kirk and his itty bitty hostage, baby Agnes.

Red meets up with Lizzie at her gravestone to tell her that, given her recent proclivity toward going rogue, he’ll be handling the tracking down of Kirk and Agnes on his own. Liz says that she understands that everyone feels betrayed by her actions, “But my daughter is missing and if you have any idea how to find her, you have to tell me.” And Red has three words for her: “No I don’t.” Okay, but he also has some other words for her, which are telling her exactly who he’s looking for — “a uniquely inventive young man named Miles McGrath” — and exactly where he’s going to find him.

In fact Red talks a pretty big game of how he’s going to be keeping Liz in the dark since she’s been mucking everything up lately and getting all her daughters kidnapped, but he’s hardly any less informative to the Post Office than usual. For example, they know right away that McGrath was a child prodigy who created a huge social media platform while at Princeton, but when his board realized that he was a high-functioning sociopath, they kicked him out. He sued (because sociopaths have entrepreneurial rights, too) and used all the money to become a venture capitalist from criminals. That’s right… he invests in crime for a cut of the profits. Aram thinks that’s pretty genius, and I have to admit, that is a Shark Tank spin-off I would watch (as well as one about Robert Herjavec and his Dancing With the Stars bride).

Lizzie and the Post Office don’t know what McGrath’s connection is to Kirk, but Red did helpfully mention exactly which hotel he’s going to track him down in London. So Cooper borrows two New Scotland Yard detectives to go scope out the scene, and when McGrath’s sidekick spots them, he kills them both, plus the guard who sees him, because what the hell I guess. Red immediately calls up the Post Office for a scolding: Now three families will have to bury their loved ones and his best lead on finding Kirk is on high alert. Was Red not clear that he needed some him-time to track down sociopaths on his own right now?!